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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lwmarti" data-source="post: 2011134" data-attributes="member: 15912">The BasicsThe HackMaster Player's Handbook (PHB) is a 400-page paperback that has a suggested retail price of $29.99 and was written by the HackMaster Development Team: Jolly Blackburn, Brian Jelke, Steve Johansson and David Kenzer. The font is a bit small, but the small font certainly let them pack in lots of material into those 400 pages. On the other hand, it also made me buy my first pair of reading glasses.Some ContextTo help you understand the opinions that I'm about to present, it may help to know that I'm an old-school gamer, so the big question for me when I first looked at HackMaster was whether or not it was a worthy successor to the games that I started playing almost 30 years ago: the original Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as well as the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) game that followed it. What I've found is that HackMaster is indeed the game that best recreates the feeling of wonder and excitement that gaming was about back then, and the Player's Handbook is one of the critical elements that lets you do this. On the other hand, if you started playing with the Third Edition D&D, HackMaster may not be for you. I really can't say, since I'll never know what it's like to do that.What's InsideWhat's in the HackMaster Player's Handbook lets you create characters that will be quite familiar to players of AD&D, yet have a few additional twists. For example, characters (with a few exceptions) get an additional 20 hit points at first level. Great, you say? On the other hand, monsters also get the additional 20 hit points, so the dynamic of combat is changed considerably in HackMaster from AD&D. Now a group of six kobolds might actually kill a character or two if you're not careful. HackMaster characters also track their Honor. Having Honor that's suitably high for your level allows you a +1 on any die roll while Honor that's too low for you level gives you a penalty of -1 on any die roll. This bonus or penalty is significant enough so that player's spend a lot of time worrying about their Honor as the game is played. HackMaster characters are rolled and then modified. Modifications to the rolled character require the use of Building Points (BPs). You get a base level of BPs based on your class and race (including races that are new for HackMaster, including pixie-fairies, gnome titans, gnomelings and grunge elves) but you can also get lots more by giving your character a wide range of quirks and flaws. So it's possible to start the game with a fighter with a Strength of 25, but who has an irrational fear of the color red and giant rats, a bad back and who snores so loudly that he attracts wandering monsters at night to make up for it. On the other hand, the Game Master is supposed to take advantage of the quirks and flaws to make the characters' lives miserable (the HackMaster GameMaster's Guide covers this in detail), so hideously min-maxed characters probably won't last long.The HumorThere's a bit of humor in the HackMaster PHB. It even explicitly states that it's "a parody of games and the people who play them," and it's not meant to be taken seriously. Some of this humor pokes fun at the wording of some of the old AD&D products in which we were told to follow all the printed rules or we weren't playing AD&D. But since gamers have been selectively ignoring rules ever since the hit location rules were published in the Blackmoor supplement to D&D back in 1975, this is certainly no time to start slavishly following every rule, so if you don't like part of HackMaster, ignore it. Don't like the humor? Ignore it and play HackMaster like the sequel to AD&D. Like the humor? That's fine too. The Bottom LineTo summarize, if you fondly remember the days of AD&D and are looking for a game that captures the spirit of old-school gaming, HackMaster may be the game for you, and the PHB is your first step towards achieving this goal and having many hours of fun. If that's not what you're looking for, you'll probably do better to stick to the third-party d20 books that are being published today.</blockquote>

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